Over the next hundred years, Chatbots.org CEO Erwin Van Lun expects different languages to meld in to one global language.
“I think our languages will integrate into one language in 100-200 years from now,” said the futurist, trend analyst and professional speaker.
“As we speak, this is what’s happening right now . . . we are all integrating — we are trying to communicate with each other.”
This melding of the languages is just one of the effects Van Lun believes will occur as chatbots, robots who engage in conversation, become more developed.
“We are developing artificial intelligence with a human-like appearance to speak back in natural language,” he said, adding that in the future he imagines all companies will be represented via virtual agent.
The use of chatbots is currently limited to customer service call centres and the virtual gaming world because they still need a little human help.
The computers are programmed with certain words and sentences and know to look for similar sentences in their databases if they come across words they don’t know yet, according to Van Lun.
“If they can’t, they feed it back to a human employee . . . and then the database is improved, enriched.”
In 20 years, they won’t need human help, Van Lun said.
“They have skill problems but they solve themselves as time passes because the hardware gets better,” he said.
“But artificial intelligence doesn’t understand the world as humans understand the world.”
The environment in which humans are constantly trying to adapt to creates a learning curve for language. The learning curve of chatbots is much slower than a typical human child but it’s still there, Van Lun said.
“A human being is designed for that but a computer isn’t . . . we’re trying to design it so they learn from what they see, like humans.”
